Live review: Cannibal Corpse – Wedgewood Rooms, 18th February 2009

Plucky locals Frosthold clearly planned to make the very best they could of what would be a dream slot for any young extreme metal band – supporting Cannibal Corpse is probably as close to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity as it gets, especially in a venue as intimate as Portsmouth’s Wedgewood Rooms. There’s even a decent percentage of crowd to catch their set.

Their stage presentation may be a little polite and clean-cut for the genre, but their gritty and straight-faced approach to their music works pretty well. Frosthold bill themselves as the Anglo-Saxon answer to the Viking battle metal outfits, so the heavy martial rhythms and grinding guitar are accompanied by growled vocals about dawn raids by longboat and foraging in enemy territory. A bit more theatre might make the material more believable, but there’s no mistaking their commitment – Frosthold may well be pillaging your village in the near future, so sharpen your scramasax.

Next up, Finland’s Diablo are this evening’s odd-men-out by merit of having comparatively accessible and melodic tunes, alongside a sense of showmanship that suggests they’re more accustomed to bigger stages… or will soon become so. Their material clearly draws on the increasingly popular Gothenburg melodic death template, with some subtle synth patches lurking in the background behind surprisingly simple riffs and lead-work and their front-man’s powerful yet tuneful voice.

Diablo’s material has plenty of dynamic changes, and brings to mind the golden-era thrash bands as much as more modern groups; the tunes breathe well, with spurts of perfectly synchronised muted guitar and blast-beats spat out as if from a well-drilled machine gun emplacement. The drumming and melodies are delivered with precision, but Diablo clearly believe that less is more, abandoning the kitchen-sink approach of the other bands on the bill for memorable hooks and quasi-pop song structures – they even go so far as to throw in a few middle-eight key-changes. Sadly, theirs is a very short set, but I get the feeling we’ll be seeing more of them soon.

Enter The Rotted. In some respects they’re a reincarnation of Gorerotted after some line-up changes (though they claim to be a different band entirely, despite dropping a few of the older group’s songs into their set), and they’re this evening’s most frantic stage presence by a long chalk, with frontman Ben McCrow in constant motion to the soundtrack of their fast and furious amalgam of extreme metal tricks and tropes.

The Rotted’s second track is introduced with McCrow explaining that it’s “about waking up in Hyde Park, naked, with no recollection of the night before”. Personal excess and confrontation with authority are their favoured lyrical themes, and this may go some way to explaining the vibe of personal catharsis that comes across from their performance – this is a band who clearly put a lot of emotion into what they do (as well as having a lot of fun).

The flipside is that while there’s evidently no shortage of musical skill between The Rotted’s members, their set suffers from a lack of coherence; everyone seems to be rushing to the end of each song as quickly as they can rather than working to ensure everything’s locked tight together. The end result is a relentless assault of rampaging guitars and drums decorated by McCrow’s screeches and growls; when they do hit a groove as a group, you can hear the potential that they’re reaching for, but all too often they sound like a gang of meth-heads on a midnight burglary jag in a music store – admirably intense but extremely chaotic.

Not surprisingly, the audience have been saving their energies for the main event; veteran Stateside death metal acts rarely tour South of London, and to have Cannibal Corpse playing Portsmouth has brought a room-full of hirsute black-clad metallers out of the metaphorical woodwork, with the band’s two-decade career reflected in the skewing of the age demographic toward people in their thirties and older. But there’s still a fair crop of younger heads, and when Cannibal Corpse arrive on stage the energy levels take a noticeable leap upwards.

Visually, Cannibal Corpse are authentically intimidating; a gang of burly middle-aged longhairs clad in metal T-shirts, clack combat trousers and boots, fronted by Corpsegrinder Fisher himself, whose bullish neck makes his head look like it was modelled by the guys who worked on Easter Island. As they take the stage, a full glass arcs out from the throng and hits the stage; Fisher warns the throwee (and any potential imitators) that if anyone fucks with him, “I’ll cut your fucking throat”. It doesn’t feel like hyperbole; by comparison to Fisher and company, The Rotted looked like a gang of wholesome but hyperactive teenagers.

Sonically, they need little introduction – if you’re already into extreme metal, you already know who Cannibal Corpse are and what to expect from them; if you’re not, it’s probably fair to say that they’re likely to be well beyond your comfort zone. Their instruments are all massively down-tuned, and the music itself is a relentless savage grind, varying between breakneck speed and an almost stately marching pace, peppered with finger-shredding solos and whammy-bar divebombs, and topped off with Fisher’s impersonation of a tonsillitis-inflicted and murder-obsessed cookie monster. It’s utterly brutal; the crowd go completely ballistic.

You don’t come to see a band like Cannibal Corpse for witty banter, and that’s probably for the best – they’re not exactly metal’s answer to PT Barnum. Fisher’s crowd interaction tends toward dismissive sarcasm and insults, and his in-song activities consist of bellowing into his mic or windmill-headbanging (which explains that astonishing neck); gaps between songs feature little more than silence as the band confer on the set-list. Credit where it’s due, Cannibal Corpse deliver a much longer set than one has come to expect from headline bands, but after three quarters of an hour the muddy sound and samey character of their material has become pretty exhausting to listen to. Unless you’re familiar with their tracks already, it can be hard to tell them apart (especially the more recent and bassy material, it seems); one blast-beat sounds remarkably similar to another, after all.

But the true faithful are evidently more than satisfied, although a decline in energy levels becomes obvious toward the end of the evening until Cannibal Corpse dig out (or should that be exhume?) a few old classics to close the set with, whipping the pit into a subdued (but, by this point, very fragrant) frenzy. There’s no way anyone with sense would try to introduce a newcomer to extreme metal by taking them to a Cannibal Corpse show, but it’s plain to see that they still deliver exactly the sort of stuff the die-hards go crazy for. That said, it’s an experience worth having if you get the chance, simply so you can say you’ve witnessed the iron-man-enduro equivalent of music at its ultimately heavy.